I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made... Psalm 139:14
"Under a microscope, the first few hours of every multicellular organism’s life seem incongruously chaotic. After fertilization, a once tranquil single-celled egg divides again and again, quickly becoming a visually tumultuous mosh pit of cells jockeying for position inside the rapidly growing embryo.
Yet, amid this apparent
pandemonium, cells begin to self-organize. Soon, spatial patterns emerge, serving as the foundation for the construction of tissues, organs, and elaborate anatomical structures from brains to toes and everything in between. For decades, scientists have intensively studied this process, called morphogenesis, but it remains in many ways enigmatic.
Now, researchers have discovered a key control mechanism that cells use to self-organize in early embryonic development. The findings, published in Science on October 2, 2020, shed light on a process fundamental to multicellular life and open new avenues for improved tissue and organ engineering strategies.
Studying spinal cord formation in zebrafish embryos revealed that different cell types express unique combinations of adhesion molecules in order to self-sort during morphogenesis.
These “adhesion codes” determine which cells prefer to stay connected, and how strongly they do so, even as widespread cellular rearrangements occur in the developing embryo." SciTech
